Denuvo Sold To Irdeto, Which Boasts Of Acquiring 'The World Leader In Gaming Security'

from the what-year-is-this? dept

Any reading of our thorough coverage of Denuvo DRM could be best summarized as: a spasm of success in 2015 followed by one of the great precipitous falls into failure in the subsequent two years. While some of us are of the opinion that all DRM such as Denuvo are destined for eventual failure, what sticks out about Denuvo is just how stunningly fast its fall from relevancy has come about. Once heralded as "the end of game piracy," even the most recent iterations of Denuvo's software is being cracked on the timeline of days and hours. You would be forgiven if, having read through all of this, you thought that Denuvo was nearly toxic in gaming and security circles at this point.

Now, however, a new development has the potential to herald a new lease of life for the Austria-based anti-piracy company. A few moments ago it was revealed that the company has been bought by Irdeto, a global anti-piracy company with considerable heritage and resources.

“Denuvo provides technology and services for game publishers and platforms, independent software vendors, e-publishers and video publishers across the globe. Current Denuvo customers include Electronic Arts, UbiSoft, Warner Bros and Lionsgate Entertainment, with protection provided for games such as Star Wars Battlefront II, Football Manager, Injustice 2 and others.”

Irdeto says that Denuvo will “continue to operate as usual” with all of its staff retained – a total of 45 across Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the US. Denuvo headquarters in Salzburg, Austria, will also remain intact along with its sales operations.

No terms of the deal are listed, but this is striking in how bizarre it all seems. Denuvo has been in something of a death spiral for going on two years now, so unless Irdeto acquired it on the cheap in order to get access to the underlying security technology to be applied elsewhere, it's hard to understand just what the point of all this is. Even more strangely, Irdeto boasts on its website that Denuvo is 'The world leader in gaming security", which is a bold claim to make of a company that can't keep itself out of the news for its tech failing to do its job.

One clue that may provide an answer is the emphasis Irdeto's press release puts on Denuvo's anti-cheating applications rather than its anti-piracy abilities.

Cheating on gaming platforms is also a challenge which must be addressed, as it can distort virtual in-game economies. This makes the game less enjoyable or even unplayable for gamers, and can be used to manipulate or bypass in-game micro-transactions. Denuvo’s anti-cheat technology prevents hackers in multi-player games from manipulating and distorting data and code to gain an advantage over other gamers or bypass in-game micro-transactions. This prevents dilution of the value of the game for the user and the game studio.

“Hackers and cybercriminals in the gaming space are savvy, and always have been. It is critical to implement robust security strategies to combat the latest gaming threats and protect the investment in games. Much like the movie industry, it’s the only way to ensure that great games continue to get made,” said Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo, Irdeto. “In joining with Irdeto, we are bringing together a unique combination of security expertise, technology and enhanced piracy services to aggressively address security challenges that customers and gamers face from hackers.”

For what it's worth, Denuvo's reputation for stopping cheating within online games is not nearly as flame-torched as its anti-piracy efforts. Still, much of the talk is about whether or not marrying Denuvo with Irdeto will breath new life into the Denuvo DRM, given the range and resources at Irdeto's disposal. It won't, at least not beyond some temporary situation. DRM will fail, forever and ever, amen.

Still, this union between the world's most hated DRM and a laughably aggressive anti-piracy outfit is not a welcome one.

Re: Denuvo is Just Resting

Anti-Cheating

I think that stopping cheating at games will prove just as sysiphean as stopping piracy, but the lifetime will, unfortunagtely, be a bit longer.

Here's the problem: Preventing cheating is just like preventing copying -- it depends on depriving the user of knowledge of how the computer works.

The longer lifetime will come from there being a bit less of a widely-exposed and incentivized attack surface -- meaning I think the audience for cheats is smaller than the audience for cracked DRM -- which may be needed simply to make the game work in the first place.

Re: Anti-Cheating

For a single player game -- you're right, but at the same time, cheats in single player games are NBD, as they only impact the player who uses them.

However, it is cheats in multiplayer gaming that are the problem -- and many of them are quite preventable by proper design practices. Sadly, between market pressure and appearance-focused game development practices, it's very easy for these practices (basically, making the server/host distrust client input) to fall by the wayside, leaving many multiplayer games wide open to a far wider variety of cheats than they should be.

The remaining cheats (usually robots/automation tools of some sort, although graphical cheats exist too) can typically be controlled through administrative practice, with some aid from gameplay design, without running intrusive software on clients.

Re: Re: Anti-Cheating

In any *reasonable* multiplayer game, my personal machine transmits messages to other computers...that supposedly reflect me playing the game. If I actually control my computer, it's an impossible problem for anyone else to tell if I enslaved my turing-tested AI to play instead of myself, thus cheating; the messages could be the same.

I'm estimating the lifetime of Denuvo's intrusive software by looking at how the dynamics change, assuming they can find buyers (that problem alone might also prolong the process), not claiming that good game design and administrative controls and generally being awesome to the players aren't more effective tools; that's usually Techdirt's job!

Re: Anti-Cheating

Yet, anti-cheating stuff possibly can cause even more security issues.

Most anti-cheat code has a component that runs in kernel mode. This component can be heavily obfuscated.

I've said before that all obfuscated code in kernel mode should be considered malware. I'm sure the NSA and co. loves such things, though, it just means it's less likely that others will rediscover their bugs...

Of course, even when anti-cheat drivers are not obfuscated, they can be horribly broken. Like CAPCOM.SYS, of which the sole purpose was to open a backdoor for anyone to execute code in kernel mode...

They say..

that there is a sucker born every minute. Oh wait, it hasn't been quite 30 seconds and here comes another one. If only someone would create a program to stop suckers from being born, I'm sure nobody would figure a way around that.

Denuvo’s anti-cheat technology prevents hackers in multi-player games from manipulating and distorting data and code to gain an advantage over other gamers or bypass in-game micro-transactions. This prevents dilution of the value of the game for the user and the game studio.

Yeah no. Certainly there's any number of cheats accomplishable - and some of them rely on the fact that clients for some games talk directly to each other, rather than a server, during gameplay. But I really can't think of any case where you'd be able to subvert microtransactions. Not with any of the effects applied that I know of.

Re:

The in-game micro-transactions are presumably intended to provide players with an in-game benefit in exchange for real-world money.

If players can get either those same benefits, or other benefits which match them or make them irrelevant, without having completed such micro-transactions, then players can bypass those micro-transactions.

If cheating makes doing that possible, then cheating makes it possible to bypass the micro-transactions.

Drowning

"Still, this union between the world's most hated DRM and a laughably aggressive anti-piracy outfit is not a welcome one."

Oh, I dunno - one drowning man trying to same himself by standing on the shoulders of another drowning man seems likely to hasten the demise of the lower without providing real, long-lasting relief to the upper.

Re:

There's something about copyright enforcement, intellectual property and DRM technology that simply makes any cognitive function go crashing out the window, prompting those who fall under its spell to make the most boneheaded moves.

Re:

The people who make these decisions have the attitude that they own things, and that DRM allows them to enforce their ownership. Also, the failures of DRM matter less to them, that its ability to extend their ownership where customers buy and accept DRM laden products.

"so unless Irdeto acquired it on the cheap in order to get access to the underlying security technology to be applied elsewhere"And by applied I read that as sue anyone that does any thing close to their newly purchased IP.